Highway of Memories, Heading for Westville

     This was the fifth poem for workshopping in Dr. Mackie's Poetry Writing class at Rogers State; we could do it on any subject and use any form. So I kind of invented one, and went with a personal story, which I'd pretty much tried to avoid all semester. This is very small Wesley visiting Mimi's trailer in Westville at the farm, and then I got all Edgar Guest-like and tacked on an explicit moral at the end. Classmates thought it was my best workshopped poem.

Wishbone could be narrating the scene;

at least, in the mind of the small boy

he could. They were exploring through the stream

pretending to be Lewis and Clark,

Brad and Rosalind; hoping to blaze a trail

to the Pacific in their jackets of blue jean.

It’s what happens when Amelia Bedelia and Corduroy

live at your grandma’s trailer; invented sports teams

shoot baskets at the hoop ‘til long after dark;

a place where imagination takes full sail,

a rodeo chute out of the washing machine

as Brad(on his bucking bronco stickhorse) played cowboy;

where bowls of late-night strawberry ice cream

could be devoured alongside tales from places like Denmark –

this was well before she grew so frail.

The farm’s run-down now, no more the clean

and orderly neighborhood of cats, horses and Happy Meal toys.

Nope; it still exists, in grammatical dream.

…Once in a while you run into Arthur the aardvark

Or those pictures of cats perched atop a hay bale.

Okay, so there might be baked beans

at supper, forcing you to employ

a distractification scheme

to hear anew about that Melville shark;

but listen to relatives’ stories for a spell.

Memories are here for a moment, before the ghosts possess

the places once lived in by those we loved the best.

By all this verse a message I hope to imply:

Don’t let the stories die.